September 2005 - Posts
Yes
Full points to my buddy
Alistair for the question :)
Ok so Andrew beat me to the punch on this one but I was sitting next to him when he blogged it so I take part credit.
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Andrew Connell
WSS SP2 is now available: MSFT WSS SP2 Aside from a hotfix rollup, the following features/capabilities that are provided by WSS SP2:
- Reverse Proxy and Alternate URL support
- IP Bound virtual servers
- SQL Server 2005
- ASP.NET 2.0
Some additional links:
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Ed Bott
If you subscribe to Microsoft Update, this should show up automatically in the next few days, but you can download it here:
Office 2003 Service Pack 2
The most interesting change is the addition of a new Phishing Protection feature to the Outlook 2003 Junk E-mail Filter. If you have Office 2003 SP2 and the latest Outlook 2003 Junk E-mail Filter Update, this feature will be turned on by default. I’ll get a screen shot and more details after I’ve had a chance to look at it.
We have the pleasure of announcing AFLite 2.0, the next big step for AFLite. The three major things that AFLite users have been asking for have been a SharePoint integration, more forms and multi-lingual support. You got them all.
-AFLite for SharePoint lets you design and display your AFLite forms right inside WSS or SPS
-The maximum number of forms has now been doubled to 10
-AFLite now offers full multi-lingual support
We think that these updates will give AFLite an even broader appeal. As an existing user, you can go to the AFLite site and download the latest version: http://aflite.businesswebsoftware.com/download.aspx.
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Microsoft Research
Outlook Mobile Manager (OMM) acts as a full-time dedicated secretary, relaying urgent emails and reminders about meetings and tasks to a user's cell phone or other mobile device when users are in mobile settings. The system considers the urgency of email and the overall context of the user in decisions about message relay and alerting. The system's behavior can be personalized so as learn to understand a user's sense for the urgency of different messages. OMM v.1.0 shipped in 2001. OMM v.2.0 add...
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Chris Perillo
I'm not sure if this is for public consumption, but I've learned about a workaround for my Windows Vista build 5219 LCD resolution hiccup (wherein the screen won't slide past 800x600). I've confirmed through a new digital friend that this registry hack indeed works for our laptop, the IBM Thinkpad T41p:
- Run REGEDIT
- Locate HKLM \ System \ CurrentControlSet \ Control \ Video \ (BLAHBLAH) \ 0001, where (BLAHBLAH) is a GUID with a whole bunch of keys under it
- Change the value with DALRULE_GETLCDFAKEEDID to 0
- Reboot
Check it out: http://www.wibsite.com/wiblog/dull/
Gems like: "I was sitting down on one of the chairs in my house. My hand was resting on the arm of the chair. I started to drum my fingers on the arm, thereby making a barely audible sound. "
A couple of hours ago I blogged about Steven Sinofsky posting re. What do manages do and how big should my team be?.
He's now posted in response to a comment and the thing that caught my eye was:
Hi there Anonymous (btw, if you work at Microsoft and want to discuss this face to face where there is a lot more context, I can promise that the open door policy is fully respected by me).
...
PS: I definitely encourage Microsoft employees to send me mail directly. My door is open and my inbox is open 7x24. I would love to have discussions with more context.
This is pretty cool that both managers can post information in a PULL fashion to all their staff (or Interested parties including staff) and also that their staff can comment / give feedback in an anonymous way.
The past week I have had a great opportunity to hang out with some really really smart people on the WCM (Web Content Management) aka. CMS team at Microsoft's Redmond Campus
Firstly - I didn't know the CMS team was as big as it is and it seems that every second person on Campus is a Program Manager :)
One interesting thing about being on campus without a blue/orange/green/red card is that you need a little sticker to show that you aren't a softie. I got given my "Angus Logan - Requires Escort" and then I thought that was a bit personal but then realised that EVERYWHERE I went I needed a blue carder with me.
If you go down to grab lunch without your escort there is no way you will ever get back into the building - and something I found out the hard way was - if you are going for meetings between buildings make it the responsibility of who your last meeting was to drop you off to the next meeting otherwise you will need to hassle your escort again (or worse get lost).
It is an interesting process but I completely agree with it - don't want anyone from Google or IBM sneaking in and getting the recipe for the secret sauce ;)
When people say "Yeah campus is big" - its not - ITS HUGE! If you have meetings between buildings (as I did a few times) I had to literally jog to make it on time, also I suggest you plan your route before you start to jog otherwise you end up heading down 1-way paths and get completely lost
I met a bunch of cool people, Ryan Stocker, Jim Masson, Gerhard Scobbe, Arpan Shah, Mike Fitzmaurice and then Arpan took me around his building and introduced me to a lot of Product Managers/Marketing people (Way Cool!) and I was pretty close to meeting a VP but his office door was closed.
Oh did I mention that EVERYONE HAS AN OFFICE. Offices are cool but I personally 'vibe' from being on the floor, annoying working closely with colleagues and being able to draw on their wealth of knowledge and also contribute my thoughts. (I think I could never work from home full time)
The final funky thing about campus is a lot of ISV's and uber partners (eg. Quilogy - who built the 30/60 new WSS templtaes) have offices near by - so I went and spent some time with the K2 and met Leah Clelland (The Contoso Girl)
So that was my first week on campus - was mega fun and learnt a whole lot about Microsoft
Now this week I have the MVP Publishing Summit and then the MVP Summit (tripple booked for dinners on Tuesday w/ lots of funky people) then the week after I have the BPI + Workflow conference.
And sadly as soon as I get back in Australia (land 9th October) I get to spend 1 day in my office and then fly down to Melbourne for a week for work
Image borrowed from USAToday :)
Steven Sinofsky wrote a great post called What do managers do and how big should my team be?
Below is an extract
Today I thought I would talk a little about a topic related to how we manage feature teams in Office. For those of you considering working at Microsoft this is a pretty important topic because the management environment and the management system (to the degree something that involves people can be called a system), the management structure will play a key role in both your success and your happiness with work. For the most part, if youre in college and going out on your first job you focus on job content (i.e. what you will be doing, what code you will write, what features you will design, etc.) and probably a little bit on the work environment (what your office is like or what the buildings are like). It is more difficult to focus on management, especially since even if youve had internships or other part time work, your first full time job will also be your first experience in being managed full time.
Check it out here.
Since I've been here its rained for about 15 minutes and that wasn't really rain. Its been warm, sunny and fun!
Check out the pictures here
My buddy Christopher Walker shoots me emails saying "Hey gus, have you seen this?"
Usually its like "Yeah I've already blogged it - www.anguslogan.com..."
BUT... Today, Christopher Walker shot me a link to the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar Beta
and I wasn't aware of it.
So this is Christopher's prize for finding something I didn't know about. - He gets his name mentioned and linked a whole lot of times in a blog post.
I know PDC was a week ago but I just managed to get my hands on the pictures.
I got to hang out with the guys from Telerik during PDC on their booth and then Spence and i went out with them for dinner/drinks etc.
Check out the pictures here
I also had a chat with them about what was coming up in the future and they have a steady pipeline of features which will be released quarterly including some interesting stuff around SharePoint :)
I've just started reading Lawrence Liu, Senior Product Manager @ Microsoft's blog.
Really good read - Check it out here
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Craig Pringle
Today is the day – MindManager
6 has been released. I’ve now got the full and final version from Mindjet (earlier
posting was based on the release candidate) and will be writing a full review
soon. Stay tuned.
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JOPX
One of the pillars of Microsoft's new ECM (Enterprise Content Management Offering) is web content management, previously Microsoft had its own server product for it, Microsoft Content Management Server. At PDC05, Microsoft finally revealed some technical details about the next version of CMS - here's a list of the things I noticed:
CMSVNext is built on top of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 - a name mentionned was Office Web Content Management Server. One of the main goals of this new architecture was to take away the divide between functionality in SharePoint and CMS since customers basically require both
The equivalent of a channel in MCMS2002 will be a WSS3.0 web - there will be a special type of document library for webpages called "Pages library". This library will contain a page layout column which will contain the URL to the template. All the content will be stored in the fields in this page library. On a page request, a page will be assembled dynamically from the content in the different fields. You can use all the functionality of standard WSS libraries such as checkin, checkout, versioning,...
CMS Template = Page Layout column
CMS placeholder control = WSS field controls
CMSVNext will offer some extra WSS field controls e.g PublishingWebControls:AuthoringContainer with better support for table layout, server side spell checking, ...
A custom ASP.Net 2.0 navigation provider for CMSVNext, you just have to write your own navigation control and use the provider as a datasource
Membership providers to write your own authentication mechanisms
While MCMS2002 basically is a toolbox - it offered an API but you still had to write a lot of code. CMSVNext will offer more functionality out of the box and will require less custom code
Support for multilingual scenarios through a core website which will have multiple variations, with a certain replication mechanism built in... not a lot of details known about it yet
A migration tool for CMS2002 content will be provided, all the templates and custom code you will have to rewrite
Support for smart client authoring of webpages - extends on Document Conversion Services - this will allow you to plug in your own code to automatically generate webpages from different applications
Extra security added typically needed for CMS - e.g. a viewer role, which allows you to view pages but not to view the WSS UI (e.g. allitems.aspx), no remote API possible, no minor or historic versions visible
Define master pages on the level of the web - can be easily changed from within the SharePoint UI
Extra deployment options - OOB deployment through the UI
Better support for anonymous access
Extra caching options: ASP.Net caching, binary caching, use cache profiles,...
Can use the search of SharePoint
Built in summary pages available - Query by Content controls (e.g. all news postings), Summary links, TOC
Better OOB workflow through the same mechanism that WSS3.0 based on WWF - approval of webpages will be similar to approval of documents in document libraries.
Some interesting resources:
Web Content Management information from PDC (Braindump) - Angus Logan
MCMS v.Next - The curtain has been lifted at PDC - Stefan Gossner
Designing Your MCMS 2002 Solution for Reusability - Use best-practice design recommendations for Microsoft Content Management Server 2002 applications and Web sites to help you create your site in a way that prepares it for future versions of MCMS technology.
Posting from Arpan Shah about the confusion surrounding CMSVNext
OFF313 Web Content Management Application Development and Engine Extensibility - slide deck from PDC
[PDC05] What about MCMS? SharePoint, yes!
mscms
pdc05
sharepoint
Catching up on things that should have been blogged earlier:
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Paul Glavich
I have been running through the Atlas hands on labs provided by Microsoft lately and really sinking my teeth into Atlas. In a previous post, I showed some of the declarative syntax that Atlas uses and how I thought it was kinda similar to Indigo. Nikhil Kothari commented that its actually much closer to Avalon and XAML bindings which obviously makes a lot more sense, given they are both technologies targetted at the user interface.
As I was running through the labs and samples for Atlas, I noticed an interesting little server control. See the image below:
An Atlas server control for a Virtual Earth Map! Now this looks like it will be a cool control to play around with. I'll post up some details when (if ;-) I get something working with it.
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Eileen Brown
Gary wondered if there was a kb article that detailed the ports that LCS used to communicate between client and server. Well Gary, all I could find is a list of the basic ports used when LCS 2005 talks to Windows messenger. here you go Gary:
Client:The client listens on a dynamic port for SIP traffic. The client sends data to the default port of the server. The default port of the server is 5060.
Server:The server listens on the default port 5060 (TCP). The server sends notifications to a dynamic port of the client. The dynamic port range can be controlled by using Group Policy. However, we recommend that you use TLS instead of TCP.
TLS mode: The client listens over the same connection that is open to the server. By default, the server listens on port 5061 (TCP). The server will send to the client only over the client's TLS session.
Whiteboard and Application Sharing: The Whiteboard and Application Sharing components of Windows Messenger use the T.120 protocol. The port that is used is fixed and cannot be changed.
Protocol: T.120 Port: 1503 (TCP)
File transfer: The messenger file transfer protocol uses the Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) that is running over TCP. The port range is fixed and cannot be changed.
Protocol Ports: TFTP 6891 – 6900 (TCP)
Audio and video: Audio uses a pair of User Datagram Protocol (UDP) ports for a Real-time Protocol (RTP) stream to transmit data. Video uses Real-time Transport Protocol (RTCP) to control the session stream. By default, the ports that are used are dynamic. However, the ports can be controlled through Group Policy registry settings.
You can use the following policies to control the port usage:
MinSipDynamicPort: Specifies the lowest port that is used for SIP Default:7100 Min1024 Max:65535
MaxSipDynamicPort: Specifies the highest port that is used for SIP Default:7103 Min1024 Max:65535
MinMediaPort: Specifies the lowest port that is used for Audio and Video signaling Default:5350 Min:1024 Max:65535
MaxMediaPort: Specifies the highest port that is used for Audio and Video signaling Default:5353 Min:1024 Max:65535
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